


Empty Spaces

by embroiderama



Category: White Collar
Genre: Body Swap, Gen, Multi, Pre-Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 13:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal's left his anklet behind with his body and gone for a drive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the "body swap" square on my [](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/)**trope_bingo** card. It's more of a sketch than a real story, I think, but it's what I've got.

Neal drove down I-95 from Boston back down to New York, trying not to speed too fast in the light nighttime traffic. He wanted to avoid getting pulled over because he wasn’t sure how solid the ID Mozzie had attached to the car and driver’s license would be. A ticket wouldn't be a big deal, but being arrested would be a problem; he needed to get back to June’s house where Mozzie was no doubt waiting, wearing Neal’s anklet. And Neal’s body.

When Mozzie had come to him, shortly after he got back out of prison following the nightmare of Kate’s death and the whole deal with Fowler, Neal thought it was a joke. And then he thought that perhaps Mozzie’s usual level of mental strangeness had crossed over into actual insanity. When he suspended his disbelief for long enough to follow Mozzie’s instructions, when the room spun around him and then settled at a different height with what looked like a slight Gaussian blur, he looked across the table and saw his own face altered by an unfamiliar expression. Wherever Mozzie had learned the trick, a mountaintop in Tibet or a back alley in Hoboken, the body swap was real. The body swap worked.

Before Neal could take off, jump in a cab and punch through the bubble of his radius, they had worked out the rules of their very strange game. No unnecessary risks to life, limb or liberty. No unavoidable interactions with friends or enemies. Nothing that would get on anybody’s radar.

No sex. Absolutely no sex.

It was an incredible gift, the occasional day of freedom that Mozzie would offer just when Neal didn’t know if he could take the confinement of his radius for another week. In Neal’s body, Mozzie tended to stay inside June’s house, drinking enough wine to leave Neal with a hangover and eating enough cheese to put Neal on salads for a week. Neal didn’t quite understand why Mozzie didn’t want to go out looking like Neal, though Mozzie had tried to explain.

“People kept looking at me,” Mozzie had muttered, shuddering like something terrible had been done to him. “Looking at me, tracking me. It’s disturbing.”

And it was true that, when he walked around looking like Mozzie, people didn’t look at Neal very often. Feeling invisible was freeing at times but lonely in a way he wouldn’t want to live with on a regular basis, and those minute interactions with people on the street weren’t the only ones that felt different. Attempts to use his normal surface-level charm and flirtation earned him blank looks and annoyed glares. The world in general was less kind, less welcoming, but Neal was free, unfettered, his own man even when he didn’t look like himself.

Neal tried not to wonder when Mozzie had learned this trick. He tried not to think about the years in prison or the months longing to catch up with Kate. He drove down the dark, bright highway feeling the differences of the body he inhabited, and the similarities. The first time they switched, Neal had thought that maybe he would leave the heavy hole inside of himself behind with Mozzie, but it traveled with him still. Whatever emptiness Mozzie had was surely a different size and shape and weight, sitting inside Neal’s body in his apartment at June’s.

Neal wondered if it was only people like him and Mozzie who could make this switch, only people who were missing something inside. He couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to change places with Peter, to walk out in the world with the power of his badge, his gun, his body, to go home to the comfort of his home and his wife. Or to switch bodies with Elizabeth, to inhabit those curves, to be the home Peter returned to at night. These were dangerous thoughts, best entertained when he was far away, in between places, in a body he had to return. They were impossible thoughts that he could only allow outside the boundary of his radius, outside the reality of the life he had for now.

Maybe one day he would learn the trick from Mozzie and go out to Brooklyn to offer up his body—literally, figuratively—to offer up his heart. Maybe one day he wouldn’t even need the trick.


End file.
